Workshops

Workshops and Doctoral Consortium will take place at the University on Monday and Tuesday (26th and 27th of June). Workshops have varying requirements for participation and deadlines for submissions. Please check the individual workshop websites below.

3D printing has become an area of intense interest in a variety of contexts in research and practice ranging from industry through education, humanitarian to innovation. At the same time, technologies, materials, usages, and appropriation are in constant flux. 3D printing is, however, just one of the many facets of digital fabrication, the digitalization of more and more sectors and increasingly community-based innovation and open/commons-oriented engineering practices. This workshop at C&T 2017 is intended to illustrate and discuss cases, positions, concepts and experiences related to such developments in digital fabrication, especially in 3D printing.

WS 2: Ethics for the ‘Common Good’: Actionable Guidelines for Community-based Design Research

Organizers:
Izak van Zyl, Cape Peninsula University of Technology, South Africa
Heike Winschiers-Theophilus, Namibia University of Science and Technology, Namibia
Retha de la Harpe, Cape Peninsula University of Technology, South Africa

This workshop is themed around the ethics of – potentially disruptive – design research in collaboration with social communities. Disruption may lead to conflict and ‘cultural resistance’ on part of communities, despite the noble intentions of research-practitioners and designers. Ethical design is not a novel concept, but it remains fundamental in the contemporary undertakings of innovative and technology-oriented research. During this workshop, therefore, participants will ideate and develop practical, actionable guidelines for conducting design- and innovation-oriented research with, for and in communities (both virtual and physical). Workshop participants will be invited to consider the philosophical-conceptual questions around ‘ethical, collective design’ in the internet age. Participants will especially be invited to problematise the ethical nature of their practice, and subsequently, to build toward critical, empathetic and more informed practice. The workshop aims to involve design-researchers from various disciplines and who carry out some form of community-based work.

WS 3: Embracing Diversity with Help of Technology and Participatory Design (EDTPD 2017)

The use of technology, both new and well established, combined with a participatory approach to design might represent an important way to embrace diversity. With diversity the organizers refer to the variety of human differences, caused either by physical impairment, cognitive impairment, chronic diseases, or the so-called neurodiversity. To design for usability, accessibility and inclusion not only means focusing on user interfaces and ergonomic aspects but also consider factors such as acceptability and appropriation. Bodily, cognitive, and emotional appropriation should be regarded as fundamental to the success of a design process that is truly open to the diversity of users. In such perspective, a participatory approach to design may be of great help in the implementation of usable, accessible, and inclusive technological solutions that put the end users and their needs at the center.

WS 4: Civic Intelligence in an Uncertain and Threatening World

Organizers:
Grazia Concilio, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
Anna de Liddo, The Open University, United Kingdom
Douglas Schuler, The Evergreen State College, United States of America
Justin Smith, Washington State University, United States of America

The future of our shared civic intelligence is in part contingent on how well we use our existing
resource to challenge dangerous and disempowering shifts, and improve the capacity of citizens to use information, form voluntary networks of action and coordinate responses that reinvigorate democratic principles. In this workshop we will explicitly examine technologies having the potential to enable civic intelligence at different scales, from the local to the global, approaching them as components of the wider ecosystem of common goods that we as practitioners and citizens can help create.

The technologies of the “sharing economy” are becoming increasingly relevant to both the daily lives of private individuals and researchers. As these tools are embedded in various communities (of interest, place, practice and circumstance) to support new forms of connection, welfare, labour and service, there emerge fundamental questions around the opportunities and perils of creation and use. In response, this workshop brings together perspectives and cases from researchers and practitioners across various disciplines to interrogate how different form of collaborative economy might be imagined and created based on the ethics and logic of care.

This workshop will serve as an open and active forum for participants of up to 20 practitioners, designers, and researchers involved in related fields. We welcome all methodological, practical, and speculative approaches to considering the relations between sharing, caring and collaborative economy.

Organizers:
Nancy Odendaal, University of Cape Town, South Africa
Alessandro Aurigi, University of Plymouth, United Kingdom

We invite scholars, practitioners and thinkers to look at smart cities from the point of view of the inhabitable, and inhabited place. Appropriation of technology is contextual with the physical and digital city experientially connected. It means understanding the cross-agency of design and socio-cultural context. We invite papers that uncover such cases with in-depth inquiry. We aim to explore the interface between urban design and embodied interaction and revisit the work on community and technology in the age of urban informatics, big data, and the Internet of things. We encourage work that displays conceptual rigor in its inquiry; either through grounded theory and allowing new readings of the ‘smart city’ to emerge or to revisit this phenomenon through critical pieces. We welcome stories from the global South that engage the growing work on southern urbanism through a techno-lens. The aim is to contribute to a textured reading of contemporary urbanism.

Digital participation is emerging as a key issue for researchers, designers, educators, industry and others as government policy increasingly seeks to include people in decision-making about all aspects of their lives. Yet, that tends to focus predominantly on mainstream communities of highly urbanized settlements, often neglecting segments of society lacking access to resources, digital technology or telecommunications infrastructure. Likewise, people from diverse and marginalised backgrounds, or who are socially excluded, such as people living with disability, the elderly, disadvantaged youth and women, people identifying as LGBTI, refugees and migrants, Indigenous people and others, are particularly vulnerable to digital under-participation, thereby compounding disadvantage. This workshop proposes to identify practical, innovative, and sensitive design solutions to support digital participation for disadvantaged communities in urban and regional environments; foster digital skills within and across communities; investigate the role of proxies in digital inclusion; and discuss design strategies for sustaining digital inclusion in the long run.

The workshop aims at stimulating and opening a debate around the capacity of Participatory Design (PD) and other co-design approaches to deliver outcomes and methodologies that can have an impact and value for reuse well beyond the local context in which they were originally developed. Projects such as those in the EU Horizon2020 CAPS program pose new questions to PD and, more generally, to any co-design endeavor. The main concerns probably consist in the scalability of participatory practices and their results. How can PD processes and outcomes scale up and become relevant in different situations, beyond the local? How can PD activities and results impact the supra-national and supra-local level? How the circulation of information and knowledge can reach beyond single, and often localized, communities of participants?

WS 9: Solutions for Economics, Environment and Democracy (SEED)

Organizers:
Lance Bennett, University of Washington, United States of America
Alan Borning, University of Washington, United States of America
Volker Wulf, University of Siegen, Germany

Quality of life for growing numbers of people on the planet is threatened by a set of integrated, systemic problems in the economy, environment and democracy. The goal of the SEED project is to form an international network of scholar/activists, advocates, and practitioners who seek to address these problems in a similarly integrated fashion. We are approaching this in two ways: first, by developing an online platform that connects our participants and facilitates sharing and assessing ideas and action experiments operating in local, national and international arenas; and second, by organizing a set of in-person workshops and other meetings of participants. This Communities & Technologies Workshop will be the first of these in-person workshops. Our goals for the workshop are three-fold: first, to help shape the plans for the SEED community; second, to present and discuss innovative proposals and work in this broad area; and third, for a key set of our participants from Europe, North America, and elsewhere to meet in person to help establish and further the connections among us.

Work has been described as being distributed, cross-organizational and multi-actor dependent, volunteer-based, fleeting, opportunistic, in-between and community-based. Work and collaborative work is indeed something that can be unforeseen by most or all of the involved actors. It can emerge and take place temporarily at the boundaries of established entities, and be independent of existing collaboration protocols. Within CSCW the formation of Publics, Infrastructuring and Knotworking has been used to talk about such open-ended collaborative work. This workshop seeks to bring together researchers and practitioners who are interested in how we study and discuss very open and emergent forms of collaboration, occurring in an improvised, temporary communities of action, at the boundaries of established communities or organizations, to address issues that challenge current organization of work. The aim of the workshop is to open a space for reflection on relevant concepts, through the discussion of concrete examples and case studies.

By tapping into the ongoing process of infrastructuring sensors, trackers, data and monitoring devices that underlies the materialization of imaginaries of a ‘smart’ society, this full-day workshop promotes a critical discussion on the assumptions and implications of such process. The workshop will put at the forefront the interplay between technology and society and will focus on topics such as acceptance, disruption, failures, privacy and ethical aspects, with the intention to go beyond the taken for granted desirability and necessity of ‘smart’ and to de-construct the mainstream rhetorics of unproblematic technological fixes to contemporary challenges. We aim at creating a lively and interdisciplinary discussion during the workshop. Therefore, we invite people interested in engaging critically with the workshop’s theme to submit a position paper (2-4 pages) about their works in progress, case studies, empirical results or theoretical analyses.

WS 12: Refugees & HCI Workshop: The Role of HCI in Responding to the Refugee Crisis

Organizers:
Reem Talhouk, Newcastle University, United Kingdom
Vasilis Vlachokyriakos, Newcastle University, United Kingdom
Aal Konstantin, University of Siegen, Germany
Anne Weibert, University of Siegen, Germany
Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed, Cornell University, United States of America
Karen Fisher, University of Washington, United States of America
Volker Wulf, University of Siegen, Germany

Over 21 million refugees are residing in camps, journeying through Europe or resettling in new countries. The magnitude of the humanitarian crisis calls for technological innovation in addressing the challenges being faced by refugees and humanitarian aid stakeholders. Both innovation communities and Human Computer Interaction researchers have begun to explore the use of technology in addressing challenges faced by refugee communities. This one-day workshop aims to (1) explore research methods that can be adapted and applied to refugee contexts and to (2) formulate a research agenda for future work. For more details please visit our website.